That’s got to be the first thing at Terra Nova, then. Sneak in, find an unmonitored plug to juice back up, then scope the place out, get a line on Theo Mondragon.
Is she just stacking tasks in front of actually having to find him out, though?
Her big fear is that once she settles in to watch for the day, it’s just going to be business as usual: yacht people doing yacht things, construction grunts grunting over construction, nature blasting out serene and pristine all around, Theo Mondragon walking the deck or the dock, having important phone conversations.
If so, then… what? Who’s left that it could even be?
Jade walks and thinks, thinks and walks, and, even though there’s warning signs and the chance of being spotted, still, she hops up onto the concrete spine of the dam, to balance across.
But not before sparking a cigarette up to keep her feet steady and sure. There’s no fence, no handrail, just nearly two hundred feet to plummet down on her left if she slips. And then about halfway across there’s the control booth to shimmy around.
At least having to be sure about each foot placement, having to track each trailing boot lace, it keeps her from dwelling too much on Mr. Holmes. She focuses hard on each next step, dials down and tries hard to think about what she’s not thinking about, as, in a slasher, that’s usually key.
What she comes up with is Cry_Wolf and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, which means admitting the worst of all possibilities: Letha herself. What if the final girl is finding all these bodies specifically because she knows where she’s left them? Would that not be the best cover? What if Letha fought tooth and nail not to move out to the sticks of Idaho, and blames everyone in Terra Nova for her losing her friends, her social life, her favorite boyfriend?
Jade would allow this… except for Letha herself. Letha who made a hard phone call to Hardy to try to save the horror chick, the sad girl, the—the Ragman of Indian Lake, yes. Trick or Treat, 1986, Alex. Ragman’s peers hate him, are always crapping on him, but so what, he’s got metal, faster harder thrashier, and he finally wishes hard enough that he gets the slasher he so thought he needed.
And it tries to kill him too.
Figures.
But no, not Letha, not the final girl. There was a moment when the slasher was getting turned on its head like that, but that moment’s over and done with. And Letha is pure, anyway — too pure. She’s not going to be the so-called final girl Leslie Vernon’s dreaming about, swinging her own panties over her head. No, Letha’s bookish, she’s virginal or close enough and she’s got the long limbs of a girl meant to run through the syrupy colors of a Dario Argento sequence. Only, where she’s running, it’s right through the Golden Age, what she’s vaulting over, it’s the Scream Boom of the late nineties, and where she’s coming down to make her stand, it’s here, it’s Proofrock.
She’s a killer, yes, but not until pushed. Not until having her good-girl veneer carved painfully away.
Jade pads up to the control booth window, can’t see through the dark glass, shimmies around anyway, and then hears the door shut behind her and has to run, run, no balance, all forward momentum, the sky all around her.
She crashes to her knees on the other side breathing hard but smiling big.
This is why she loves coming around the lake this way instead of walking two miles down for the bridge: it’s always a close call, is always the best rush.
And, where she’s landed, she’s pretty sure, is in the last act, the third-reel bodydump. Somewhere out there Letha’s probably screaming about a corpse unfolding from the ceiling, and another crammed into a cabinet.
It puts a pep in Jade’s step, just on the off-chance she can see that from far way.
She keeps to the top of the chalky bluff above Camp Blood —no choice: it’s not like you can get to Camp Blood without looping around almost all the way to Terra Nova. Two or three minutes later she can see the yacht at its usual mooring, and then the Umiak in its shadow, no longer in floating impound.
Since it’s the first boat anybody takes, Jade assumes the rest of the boats are in their garages, even though all the Founders are, for once, because one of their own fell, here.
The long flat barge the construction crew drinks their coffee on, crossing before sunup each morning, is already back at Proofrock, Jade imagines, taking up ten or twelve berths, Terra Nova just renting out that whole quarter-mile of the shore.
And the houses over here, goddamn.
Somebody’s mixed some Miracle-Gro into those frames, those roofs, those driveways, all that landscaping. It reminds Jade more of a cartoon than a gated community: the outlines of the houses were there all along, all they needed was some great hand to tip a bag of ink over into the chimney, to let color leach down all the lines, find all the corners, fill in all the windows.